WILL OCKENDEN: In entertainment, the internet has been the great leveller.

It's disrupted entire industries by simply allowing anyone with consumer products, to publish high quality content for a world-wide audience.

(Excerpt from YouTube video Community Channel)

NAT TRAN: Hi, so I'm not that great with etiquette.

FEMALE: You're so much better off without him, isn't she Nat.

NAT TRAN: Does that mean that he's single now?

FEMALE: Nat.

NAT TRAN: I'm joking. I don't know if she's cool with it.

FEMALE: What is wrong with you?

(End of excerpt)

WILL OCKENDEN: As videos, photos, tweets, instagrams, blogs, snapchats, vines, Facebook posts, etc. are all uploaded to various websites, they're stored in massive data centres packed full of computers.

But as the file quality gets better and better, the files get bigger and bigger and storing it all is becoming more of a challenge.

TOM O'BRIEN (excerpt from YouTube video Data Storage Solutions): So the challenges that a storage administrator faces today is the tremendous growth in data.

WILL OCKENDEN: The amount of data created is nearly doubling every couple of years.

But scientists may have found a solution to the storage problem.

They've worked out a way to massively expand data storage on optical disks like CDs, DVDs or BluRays.

MIN GU: We can break the limit of one of the fundamental laws in the optics.

WILL OCKENDEN: From here we need to go all the way back to the 1870s, to meet a German physicist called Ernst Abbe.

He published a law about minimum widths of light beams when shined through a lens.

His law showed a beam of visible light cannot really get any smaller than about 500 nanometres. That's about 500 billionths of a metre.

But Professor of Optoelectronics at Swinburne University of Technology Min Gu has figured out a tricky way around Ernst Abbe's law.

MIN GU: We can actually use a two laser beams, not one laser beam.

WILL OCKENDEN: It's a bit like trying to paint a fine line on a wall using a paintbrush with a 20cm diameter. Using one paintbrush, all you can get is one 20cm line.

But with two paintbrushes, it's possible.

The first paints the thick red line on the wall, but the second is aligned slightly off centre, and its 20cm diameter brush removes most of the red line with a white paint.

What's left is a thin, red line.

MIN GU: You can squeeze the light down to 10nm then you can put more information onto one disk. But what we say is that we can increase the capacity by 1,000 times.

DR EVIL (extract from film Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery): Mr Powers, you'll notice that all of the sharks have laser beams to their heads. I figure every creature deserves a warm meal.

WILL OCKENDEN: It may not please Dr Evil, but the technique wouldn't be used in movie distribution -nor would it be strapped to sharks - instead it could be used more in the data centre cloud storage industry.

MIN GU: Each day the centre is about one petabyte. The current big data centre is occupy one football stadium in order to get a one petabyte storage capacity. This way eventually the disk will be very useful, replace the old attach form technology for the big data centres.

WILL OCKENDEN: There are no guarantees the storage industry will use the technology if it was made commercially available.

Hard drives allow more storage every year and are getting cheaper and cheaper and there's also a lot of research and development going into flash and solid-state storage, which is much faster.

But Professor Min Gu's discovery is another option for a world undergoing a data boom.

MIN GU: The information we produce is actually a part of our culture so it's for our future generations. So the fact that we can coding all this information for our future generation is very important.

From the Archives

Sri Lanka is now taking stock of the country's 26-year-long civil war, in which the UN estimates as many as 40,000 Tamil civilians may have been killed. This report by the ABC's Alexander McLeod in 1983 looks at the origins of the conflict as it was just beginning.